These 10 personal essays explore the trajectory of my career as a critical care and emergency flight nurse, and examine the shadowy pale---the interstice---between the person and the profession. They render the physical and technical realities required to resuscitate a 46-year old father of four in a helicopter at 1500 feet of altitude, forty minutes out from the receiving hospital, or to hand-ventilate a 320 gram infant. But they also explore what I think of as "understory": how my patients infiltrate and affect me, often many years after I care for them, the odd, secular magic there is in it, how the work seeps into family life and family life seeps into the work, and how the process of caring for people on the knife's edge brings some universal questions into specific relief, including questions about the caregiver's own mortality and place in the universe.
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